“Biggest Risk Is Not To Take Any Risk.” - Mark Zuckerberg.
Prudence is a virtue, but a person may be too prudent. Economy is an excellent habit but our penuriousness spoils our fortune as much as if we were a spendthrift. There is a certain audacity in business, in love, and in life that is essential to success.
Do not be too timid. Do not be too cautious. If you will wait until you have no suspicions, you will never do anything at all. Use a large-hearted, statesmanlike breadth and liberality in your enterprise and in your activity. In the end, your bread will come back to you. It will come back in large and wide profit.
We can be too cautious in this life. The unpredictable future can paralyze some people into inaction. Too much hesitation. Too much caution. Too much calculation. Our business is to grapple with what actually is, and what lies within reach. Few great enterprises have waited for ideal conditions. There are risks in doing anything, but don’t let such things deter you from living or trying.
Those very punctilious and scrupulous people who will sift everything to the bottom in every case, before they will act. Those who must be fully satisfied on all points, seldom do any good and are themselves generally good for nothing.
If you go always looking at the clouds, if you are always peering out to see where the cat’s-paw wind is coming, you will never sow your field, and you will never reap. You had better sow every year. Sow when the spring looks black. Sow when the early summer seems to forecast a stormy autumn. Sow year by year. That is the right thing to do. Some years you will lose, but at the end, when your life is done, you will have made a large gain. A great profit.
We misunderstand a wise principle. We say to ourselves that we ought to calculate profit. We ought to look out for results. So, mistaking this fact that we ought to choose to do our goodness in the wisest and likeliest way, we mistake that wise habit of prudence, judgment, and we turn it into a petty trafficking attempt to secure certainty that every little thing we niggardly do is going to bring us a definite and special return. Now, you cannot do that in business. Fancy a farmer he goes across the field sowing corn, taking it out grain by grain, and saying, “I wonder whether this grain will be eaten up by a bird, whether this will rot in the ground. I do not know, and therefore I will not sow it.” That would be silly.
It is not certain you shall reap all you sow, but it is absolutely certain you cannot reap unless you sow. Your work shall not be unavailing. To do any work with ardor and thoroughness and perseverance we must have a strong assurance that it will succeed, and in the noblest work, we have that assurance. The seed that was sown generations ago is bearing fruit today, and it shall be so once more with the seed we sow.
If we are too scrupulous we are never likely to succeed in anything. If you neither plow nor sow till the weather is entirely to your mind, the season will in all probability pass before you will have done anything.
We are not to spend the brief day of life in wistfully surveying those unfavorable conditions or those calamities which surround our existence. We are to go forward. We are to do the utmost in, and to make the best of, that certain duty in that state of life.
Just face the fact that things may go wrong, but get out there and do your work anyway. Waiting for the ideal time can cause you to put off something until it is too late. One cannot use the possibility of misfortune as an excuse for inactivity. Someone who is forever afraid of storms will never get around to working in the field.
To demand a certainty of success before acting would mean not to act at all. In the most simple forms of business, some risk must be had.
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. ” — T.S. Eliot.
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” — William Faulkner
